Re: Justin's letter,
I write in response to Justin's letter to the Editor and his rather postmodern attack on Ali Alexander
for referring tangentially to "proper" Spanish. Mr.
Alexander's comment apparently bothered a number of readers who do not seem
to understand that English, particularly American English, is a peasant
language for which rules were never formally encoded and for which proper
usage is the result of informal consensus (and even in English, class
distinctions are made regularly based on how one speaks, as when the Dixie
Chicks disparage country singers who do not use their accents ironically).
This is not the case for most languages.
In English there is no universal standard and each distinct form of
speech is a dialect. Dialects exist in other languages but there are
generally standard forms of speaking. Even in Spanish, there are proper
ways to speak and improper ones. Often the rules of grammar depend on whom
one is speaking to. In my first language, Czech, there are three such
forms, written or formal Czech, which closely resembles the 16th Century
prose of Jan Hus and is used to write or speak before an audience, polite
Czech, used with elders, in professional settings and so forth, and spoken
Czech which is how people talk to friends and family. Within 10 minutes of
conversation, it is possible to peg a person's degree of education down to
the year based on his ability to chose the correct form. While Czech is
admittedly extreme in this regard, most widely used languages are more like
this than like English. If Justin doubts this I encourage him to live a few
years in a foreign country that does not use much English.
As for Justin's other point about multilingual ballots, proof of
citizenship is not generally required of people trying to vote. Even if it
were, in many local governments, US citizenship is not a requirement to
local citizenship. The unlamented (at least by most of our readership)
Congressman Bob Dornan would still be a member of the House were the
restriction enforced (he lsot by a handful of votes shown to be less than
the number of non-citizens who voted against him). When so many foreign
countries insist on English as a second or third language for practical
reasons, primarily the dominance of American culture, I fail to see why
Justin has a problem with insisting on it here. Someone who does not speak
English will generally be a second class citizen of the world, much less of
the overwhelmingly mono-lingual US.